yesterday whilst i was at work i recieved a phone call asking me if i could identify a ww2 relic somebody had dug up, so when i got home they brought it round for me to see and told me "it was covered in rocks and shells so we hit it all off with a chisel " lol after seeing what it was they found im supprised they were still alive! after i told them what it was they took it straight home and called the police (after polishing and chiseling it a bit more in their kitchen!) anyway here it is... a British 18 pounder shrapnel round!!!!

That could have been the fastest redecoration of a kitchen in history! From the marks on the driving band, looks like was fired, but failed to detonate. Possibly bad fuse.

As we have development encroaching on military bases here in the US- or are closing and recycling older military bases, we are encountering more and more UXOs. I am working on a training document for contractors over the next few months on the Do's and Don'ts for these. Hammering on one in your kitchen is VERY high on the Don't list.....

"This is not about land or money...but the one thing that no man should never be able to take from another man: the freedom to make his own choices about his life, where he'll live, how he'll live, how he'll raise his family. "

Years...more like a lifetime ago..., we grew up overseas on air bases, one of which was Clark AFB, in the Philippines. Well, as young school kids, we crawled around under one of the school buildings chasing bugs and whatever. Digging in the sand and dirt under our building, we uncovered what looked to be a round "pot". So we kept digging at it, trying to dig it out of the dirt. I can't remember how many times we punched, kicked, and hit that thing with sticks, rock, fists, and feet. When it started getting "long" instead of round, we got more curious and invited the older kids to come look at it. Well...the excitement caught the attention of the teachers, who promptly moved us out of that area, and the base EOD came out. They closed that area of the school for a week, while they pulled out our "pot", which turned out to be a 132 pound bomb, from WWII, unexploded and still live A search of the surrounding area turned up another one, and several rounds of 7.7mm machine gun rounds, and quite a few 20mm cannon rounds, they think all came from a Japanese Zero.

Clark, used to be Fort Stotsenburg, originally an Army air base, that got hit the day after Pearl Harbor did. So we used to scour all over the base, up in the hills, in the swamps around the golf course, and behind the high school. We found all kinds of war memoribilia, relics, ammo, guns, munitions, etc. The hard part, was trying to keep it. Whenever you packed your household, Air Force and US Customs did a heck of a job making sure of "what" you had I must have given up a fortune in U.S. and Japanese helmets, swords, pistols, rifles, munitions, uniforms, radios, you name it. What got us in hot water was finding a case of Japanese hand grenades, and throwing them down this river valley. Nothing happened, for the longest time. Then all hell broke loose, and we had the base security police and OSI all over us before we even knew what was going on. No one's dad's lost any rank over all of our shenanigans, and luckily none of us ever got hurt.

But in the times we were stationed over there, on Guam, and Okinawa, we did hear of several enlisted men, and a few dependents, losing their lives when they found things. It wasn't rare for the items to be booby-trapped, and over the years, the explosives would become very unstable, so it didn't take much to set them off. At Clark, an officer's kid found a 20mm cannon round that was all rusty and corroded, and used a hammer to knock the rust off. He was the first fatality we heard of, and hit close to home, because that came from an area that we always dug around in. You can still find alot of that kind of stuff out there if you look...just be careful

Years...more like a lifetime ago..., we grew up overseas on air bases, one of which was Clark AFB, in the Philippines. Well, as young school kids, we crawled around under one of the school buildings chasing bugs and whatever. Digging in the sand and dirt under our building, we uncovered what looked to be a round "pot". So we kept digging at it, trying to dig it out of the dirt. I can't remember how many times we punched, kicked, and hit that thing with sticks, rock, fists, and feet. When it started getting "long" instead of round, we got more curious and invited the older kids to come look at it. Well...the excitement caught the attention of the teachers, who promptly moved us out of that area, and the base EOD came out. They closed that area of the school for a week, while they pulled out our "pot", which turned out to be a 132 pound bomb, from WWII, unexploded and still live A search of the surrounding area turned up another one, and several rounds of 7.7mm machine gun rounds, and quite a few 20mm cannon rounds, they think all came from a Japanese Zero.

Clark, used to be Fort Stotsenburg, originally an Army air base, that got hit the day after Pearl Harbor did. So we used to scour all over the base, up in the hills, in the swamps around the golf course, and behind the high school. We found all kinds of war memoribilia, relics, ammo, guns, munitions, etc. The hard part, was trying to keep it. Whenever you packed your household, Air Force and US Customs did a heck of a job making sure of "what" you had I must have given up a fortune in U.S. and Japanese helmets, swords, pistols, rifles, munitions, uniforms, radios, you name it. What got us in hot water was finding a case of Japanese hand grenades, and throwing them down this river valley. Nothing happened, for the longest time. Then all hell broke loose, and we had the base security police and OSI all over us before we even knew what was going on. No one's dad's lost any rank over all of our shenanigans, and luckily none of us ever got hurt.

But in the times we were stationed over there, on Guam, and Okinawa, we did hear of several enlisted men, and a few dependents, losing their lives when they found things. It wasn't rare for the items to be booby-trapped, and over the years, the explosives would become very unstable, so it didn't take much to set them off. At Clark, an officer's kid found a 20mm cannon round that was all rusty and corroded, and used a hammer to knock the rust off. He was the first fatality we heard of, and hit close to home, because that came from an area that we always dug around in. You can still find alot of that kind of stuff out there if you look...just be careful

Holy ****! You shoulda started a museum!
What was the most exotic thing that you guys found?
Also, what kinds of guns did you guys find?

:EDIT:
I found an old presidential button once. I think it is from the 1800's.

__________________

"This is my rifle, this is my gun." "This is for fighting, this is for fun." -Full Metal Jacket

"I joined the Navy to drink in foreign countries and fornicate." -unknown

Digging up anything like that can rapidly become the last thing you ever do. Get the police on the scene first of all to secure the area, then let the pros figure out what they have and what to do with it. There are all sorts of reasons for a round like that not detonating as designed, but that doesn't mean they are safe.

Scary!
A friend of mine works as a driver on pipeline projects. He switches projects & companies frequently. He left a project in MS last year, and heard a week later that they dug up some artillery shells of some kind. He was glad to have switched to a GA worksite. IIRC, the ammo was from some ancient training session & had been layed out along a line that happened to be the same line the pipeline was following; the military peeps found some other locations that the pipeliners would've hit later.